Category: Photos around Cape

I went to lunch with a couple of old classmates last week, Bill Hopkins and Van Riehl. I use the word “old” and not “former” for good reason. That’s Bill in the foreground of a photo from our high school days. You can tell from the body language that he’s trying to work his way out of what would have already been a knuckle-rapping in Ruby Davis’ class. I don’t have any photos of Van because he was an underclassman and beneath note.

During the course of the conversation, they both said that Sandy’s Place, a restaurant down at the Cape Airport has the best catfish around. I take advice like that with a grain of salt from these characters. These are the kind of friends who would tell you, “Oh, sure, the ice is thick enough to skate on,” and “Yes, the electricity is turned off” just before you started working on the light switch.

It never dawned on me that these hooligans could conjure up a near tornado, complete with torrential rain, marble-size hail and wind gusts that made driving almost impossible.

I spent the afternoon up at SEMO talking with Lisa Speer in Special Collections about picking up my Cape photos when I go toes-up. She thought they might have a trash can just the right size to house them.

Storm’s a comin’

Anyway, I called Mother and said, “Let’s hit the catfish joint. Better be waiting, because I think it’s gonna come a gully-washer.” About two hills down Mt. Auburn road, I heard someone on the police scanner say, “We’ve got hail in Chaffee.”

I said, “Let’s find cover, looks like it’s coming our way.” We pulled into a bank drive-through window just as the rain cut loose and the wind began to howl. No sooner had I told the nice lady at the bank we weren’t there to transact business, but to seek shelter from the storm, wind-borne pea-size hail peppered the car.

Video of the storm

After a bit, the hail let up and I thought had caught a break. About the time we were going to turn onto I-55 from William, the hail was back. The water on Siemers Drive was about a foot deep when I spotted a Sonic drive-in with some cover. So did everybody else. There was one last stall open when we got there.

I debated ordering something to justify our parking space, but I saw the curbhops getting blown around and pelted with flying ice that was somewhere between marble-size and maybe an inch around. I figured it would be an act of kindness NOT to have them bring anything to the car. Traffic on the scanner was reporting bad stuff happening all over the area.

Catfish and pie were great

The storm moved quickly out of Cape, the skies brightened and we made it to the airport uneventfully. We lucked out there, too. Because of the storm, we didn’t have to wait in line. By the time we finished some excellent all-you-can-eat catfish, there must have been more than two dozen folks waiting for our table.

Except for trying to kill me in a storm, Bill and Van had some good advice for a change. I recommend the catfish and coconut pie to everyone. Just check the weather forecast first.

I photographed Doris Bentley at Doris’ Antiques at 627 Good Hope on March 29, 2010. She set up her shop in 1981, after coming from Chaffee.

She had gone through a rough patch. She had broken her hip about a year before; when she recovered enough to reopen, she said she had one good week, then a 10-day ice storm. Right after that, the meter reader discovered a leak in her basement.

Doris probably didn’t weigh as much as a sack of quarters, but she was fiesty beyond her size. A thug broke into the shop when she was working one night. “All I had was a dollar bill and some change,” she said. “I told him it was all I had.” He knocked her around a bit.

“You’re mine and I want you!!”

She described her TV interview after the robbery: “I looked right into the camera and said, ‘You’re mine, and I want you!!'” I don’t doubt for a second that she meant it.

The next time couple of times I came back, the store was closed. I asked a nearby merchant if he had any idea how Doris was doing, and he said he thought she was in a nursing home in Springfield, Mo., and probably wouldn’t be back.

Absolute Auction April 16

Wednesday’s Missourian carried an ad for an absolute auction this weekend where the shop’s contents will be sold. Click on it to make it large enough to read.

Brother Mark is an antique shopper who had been in Doris’ many times. I asked him to tell me what he knew about her. What follows is his account:

Doris was a female Popeye

Doris – If there ever was a female Popeye, it would have been Doris. While I doubt that she was ever in the Navy, and I don’t think I ever saw her smoke a pipe (but I wouldn’t rule that out) and I have no idea if she had any tattoos of anchors on her arms, I wouldn’t bet that she didn’t. She could be gruff if she didn’t think you were good people and the nicest lady if she sized you up as being “square and true”.

Is she open or has she closed?

The store – The first thing that comes to my mind anytime that I would go there to shop was, “is she open or has she closed her door for the last time and I missed it?” Turns out, she was always open when she was open. I heard that she had gotten broken into a couple of times and from then on she stayed in the shop in the back and slept with a gun. Don’t know for certain if that was true, but it’s rumors like that going around that make folks thing twice about breaking in at night.

Aisles were packed with stuff

The aisles were packed with stuff. All kinds of stuff. Cheap yard sale stuff sat right next to McCoy pottery for those who could spot it. You wanted old metal ice cube trays that you used to have in the old refrigerator/freezer? She had them along with Tupperware containers, AVON bottles and stuff that I could not figure out how she ever thought she would sell it.

Trash and treasures

There was trash and there were treasures in the store and you had to either have a sixth sense about finding the good stuff or just be lucky to stumble onto it. Doris was smart in that she knew the value of everything, so you weren’t going to walk out under her nose with a Vintage Fiesta AD Demitasse Cup and Saucer for $15.* [Editor’s Note: Asterisk decoded below.]

T-I-M-B-E-R!

But whenever I walked through her store looking for something that would catch my eye, I was always worried that something from the overstocked shelves would catch onto me and I would end up pulling down everything quicker than you could say “T-I-M-B-E-R!” She had a lot of glassware in the store that made me very nervous.

A picker’s delight

The store was a picker’s (not the musical kind) delight in that you could find something, and she would sell it to you, but she wasn’t going to lose money in the transaction.

Here’s the asterisk

*Vintage Fiesta AD Demitasse Cup and Saucer Set in 50s Forest Green Glaze »

Circa 1951-1959. Stunning example of the very hard to find, vintage, forest green Fiesta After Dinner Demitasse Cup and Saucer. The cup was jiggered on the inside and the slip cast handle had to be attatched by hand – even the foot was hand worked to produce a subtle flare.

Good Hope won’t be the same

Good Hope and Cape Girardeau won’t be the same without Doris and her shop. She was one of a kind.

Fellow Class of 65 classmate Shari Stiver was in town, so we cruised all over Cape looking for cool stuff. One of the things on our bucket list was to find a house allegedly used as a Civil War Hospital.

We ended up at 444 Washington looking at a home that was supposed to be one of the oldest in the city.

John Mark Scully, son of the former president of SEMO and a resident of the house until he and his family moved to Kansas, wrote a long history of the property for The Missourian Aug. 8, 1975. It’s worth following the link to read his account.

Sally Wright wrote a story about the house and the Scully family in 1972. Again, if you follow the link, it’ll save me a lot of typing.

Facts about the Sherwood-Minton House

There are some tidbits that surface in most of the stories I’ve read. The more research I do, the more I’m convinced that all you have to do it tell a story once. After that, it gets picked up by multiple sources that keep repeating it. Newspaper reporters, in particular, get assigned a story, go to the clip library to find out what’s been written before, throw in a few grafs of new material, then call it a day.

• The deed goes back to the early 1800s, when it was part of a farm owned by a fur trader, who sold the land to Don Louis Lorimier.
• The Rev. and Mrs. Adriel Sherwood bought 4.55 acres from Alfred Ellis, whose father, Charles Ellis, had bought 20 acres when Lorimier’s estate was settled in 1819.
• Rev. Sherwood selected E.B. Deane, the architect who build the Ellis-Walthren-Ranney house on North Main, to design the house. [Editor ‘s Note: Ellis-Walthren-Ranney is what was in The Missourian. Reader Sally Bierbaum Dirks says it should be Ellis-Wathen-Ranney. She should know. See her comment below. Darned newspapers. You can’t trust ’em.] Most of the lumber used was cut on the property and all glass and bricks were handmade.
• In 1849, the Washington Female Seminary settled in the Sherwood home. The Rev. David Edward Young Rice was the first principal. Tuition for boarding students was $65 for a five-month session; an additional dollar was added each session to pay for fuel for the classroom.
• During the early part of the Civil War, the home housed officers. It is said that gouges in the stairs were made by the officers’ spurs.
• Later in the war, the home served as a U.S. smallpox hospital.
• Rumors that there is a tunnel under the house have floated around for years. (Every old house, the Common Pleas Courthouse and Fort D had tunnels, if you believe the legends. Most of them have been proven false.) Mrs. John Mark Scully said she thought the tunnel existed, but had been boarded up. Mrs. Scully talked about trying to open it up, but they moved from the house before they did it.
• After the war, the Washington Female Seminary held classes in the home until 1971.
• Mrs. Frances Minton lived in the house from 1904 until her death in 1919.
• The H.E. Sproat family lived there the longest. They moved into the house on May 14, 1924, and stayed until the 1960s.
• From the early 1960s until the Scully family moved in, Mr. and Mrs. Gene Bierschwal lived in the home and also used it as for off-campus housing for SEMO women students.
• In 1985, The Missourian wrote that “One of the city’s oldest homes has reverted back [that redundancy drives me crazy] to the financial institution holding the mortgage on it, and a number of persons at that lending institution are hoping that a buyer interested in preserving its historic value can be found.” The building is still standing, so someone must have bought it.